In June 1971, MELANIE was among the most eagerly awaited headliners at the Glastonbury Fayre – the free festival predecessor of the modern Glasto beanfeast, and an event oft-described today as the climax of the British underground, both musically and culturally.

Melanie was sharing the stage with some of the movement’s most significant acts, including Hawkwind, the Edgar Broughton Band, Traffic, Arthur Brown, Gong and David Bowie, and since her death in January 2024, several of her fellow counter-culture travelers have paid their own musical tributes to her, among them Terry Reid (the man who turned down Led Zeppelin!) and the Pink Fairies.  

Now, Ozric Tentacles, long-running heirs to that same cultural throne (and veterans themselves of later Glastonbury events), step forward with their own appreciation of Melanie, layering their unmistakable textures and tones around what the New York Post once described as her “hauntingly beautiful” rendition of “California Dreaming,”  released today on all digital platforms.

The Post continued, “Melanie’s strange phrasing allows her to get nuances out of songs”; while the Boston Globe credited her with “an impassioned vocal that gives the song [a] poignancy that the Mamas and the Papas’ smooth harmonies could not pin down.”

Those were the qualities that drew Ozric Tentacles multi-instrumentalist leader Ed Wynne to the performance.

Melanie’s original recording of “California Dreaming” came about completely by accident. “We didn’t even know we were going to do it, or that [it was being] record[ed],” she recalled in 2023. Pianist Richard Tee “was just doodling on the piano one day, and he started playing that song, so I joined in, and that was all there was to it.  Then [we] played it back and – that has to go on the album.”

With Tees’ piano the only thing standing between Melanie and an a capella vocal, “California Dreaming” emerged one of the most powerful, and moving, vocal performances of her entire career – as the Los Angeles Times noted when it described her as “a distinctive vocalist whose wistful, raggedy style has taken on a note of fully developed authority.”

Ozric Tentacles’ contributions only amplify those qualities, even as they reach back in time to recapture the radical outlaw status that the young Melanie brought to the festival circuit.

On record, it is true, she was rarely permitted to disrupt the “whimsical hippy chick” imagery that the media had draped across her.  On stage, however, she purposefully overlooked her best known songs; defiantly flaunted live venues’ insistence that audiences sit quietly throughout her performances; and effortlessly captivated everyone from stoners to Hell’s Angels with voice and acoustic guitar alone.  

In fact, just moments before she was called onstage at Glastonbury, Melanie was sitting in front of the stage, drinking homemade beer with a bunch of bikers.  “You see it in the movie, I hoisted myself up onstage from the front, and that’s when I was drinking the beer that these guys made….”

It was an attitude with which Ozric Tentacles themselves have forever identified.  Formed at the 1983 Stonehenge free festival by a handful of teenaged friends, the Ozrics – like Melanie – were most at home amongst what they called “their own people”; that is, those who regarded making and listening to music as a fundamental human right, not a business proposition.

They still are, they still do. And the biggest surprise about “California Dreaming” is not that the band have so happily turned their attention to Melanie, but that it took them so long to do so!

SINGLE: https://orcd.co/melanieozrictentacles_californiadreamin